Category Archives: Manga

Yes I know it’s been a while and I’ve neglected my blog again. Well this time I want to give an update on my manga Dodge Battle High.

The story centers around Akihiro. A high school freshman but not at an ordinary high school. It’s Dodge Battle High where your grade and schooling are all about dodgeball. People see dodgeball as only a game but if you think about it, there’s team building, working together, leadership skill building and more.

So why did this gaijin decide to become a genkushuka (manga writer)? Well I do watch a lot of anime, I do read manga and have an affinity for the Japanese culture. Japan still has a culture where respect and loyalty means something wheres here in the US they mean nothing. I’ve always had in interest in samurais and ancient Japan and new Japan too which still hasn’t become what the US is now where no one respects each other and every nutcase has a gun. Now I’m not going to say writing a manga is an easy task but as a teen I used to write and draw comics so it’s not something foreign to me. Though full scripting for someone else to do the drawing is.

Now a little more about the story. Akihiro is a kid who has become disinterested in the world. He lost his parents at an early age and kind of went into a shell. His older sister Kazue has done her best to keep them together and be somewhat of a parent. What makes the task even harder is they have younger siblings, twins named Akiko and Akira. I don’t want to give too much away but there was someone who got Akihiro to come out of his shell and turn him into someone very family orientated but that person also was “lost” just not in the same way as his parents.

Some of the other characters who play an important role are Hoshiko (Akihiro’s friend), Jin (another friend of Akihiro), Aoi (another student at Dodge Battle High), Tom (Akihiro’s arch rival) amongst a list of many. All the names I have to come up with, daaaaaaaaamn.

The characters in the book will each has their issues that they work on during the course of the manga. They’re teenagers so it’ll be some of your typical teenage issues like lonliness, bullying, depression, shyness, etc. Why? Because while it’s a comedy manga it’s not your typical comedy without content besides comedy. Actually it hits several genres like slice of life, harem, sports, romance but there will be gags and comedy all over the place too. It’s to be expected with teens.

This is a sketch of Akihiro

More Akihiro

This is a sketch of Hoshiko

This is a “neko” Hoshiko sketch

This is a sketch of Jin

This is a sketch of the twins though they appear a bit older than they are at the beginning of the story

Soon I will be starting to get some pages drawn and preparing for a possible Kickstarter. And a note about the art. I am a big fan of art as most people know. I appreciate art in many forms especially fan art because it shows that people like what you’re doing. If there is a Kickstarter (most likely will be) and you do some type of art then surely let me know. Tweet me, I’ll probably retweet it as long as it’s tasteful. If it’s hentai then I won’t. If it has the kids in sexy poses or compromising positions then I won’t. I know some places might even find it okay to see kids like that but I personally don’t and you won’t see that in the manga and if it becomes animated it will be at the top of my list of things to say to the animation studio. Obviously I’m not stopping you from doing what you do but it’s just my personal stance.

So a gaijin genkushuka from the US, potential artist from Spain, trying to break into a market that’s mainly in Japan. Easy task? Not at all. But I’m damned sure going to try.

Where to begin…work has been hectic. I did have the wrist injury so that left me not able to type too well for like 2-3 months. Summer 2016 anime has been blah, I mean really blah. Been working on the game a lot and trying to coordinate artists, programmer help, voices, etc. So yes it’s been pretty busy lately. Going to try to add more to this blog and porkpieplatypus.com the next few weeks.

Custom Maid is about a high school otaku who is “in the closet” about her obsession. The twist is she is from a rich family so she couldn’t show her love of anime/manga and all the culture even if she wanted to. Yuu even keeps her distance from her maids until she ends up being found out by her new maid Masaki. What she doesn’t know is that Masaki is actually one of her favorite doujinshi artists.

Custom Maid was one of the Best New 4-koma manga series of 2015 so someone out there likes it. This is one I’ll keep an eye on. For some reason I always find clueless rich people trying to be normal, to be funny.

I’m not even sure how I came across Nanako but started reading and it’s an okay little manga.

The premise seems to be about Kawara and Nanako and the “interesting” positions you find them in. Kawara is a boy who seems like your traditional “nice guy”. But he’s like every other teenager and seems to really like Nanako who is a shapely girl that doesn’t seem to be too bright. Could be wrong but there isn’t much academically with her. Kawara seems to always be trying to look up her skirt or ends up in positions where he can because she’s clumsy at times but then also tomboyish too where she’ll climb up somewhere without thinking about being in a skirt. Continue reading

Furumapura is another manga by Cool Kyoushinsha. (Yes I like his work dammit)

It’s a simple 4 koma about high school girls who meet by chance. Kyou is a loud, overbearing kind of girl who seems to have an Irish accent or probably British since they love the Brits but it seems more Irish to me (at least that’s how the English version I read, made it seem). While Makoto is a quiet girl who uses signs to talk but it’s not with words. These signs are numbered 1-10 as if it was a rating system. Kyou has to figure out what the numbers mean and she pretty much carries the book since Makoto does not talk at all, just uses the signs. Continue reading

This is one that came up as similar to Ojojojo so I checked it out too. Ojojojo is a lot more of a heartwarming type comedy/gag manga where Houkago Play is…well some type of comedy but I personally got very few laughs out of it. I try to keep my feeling about something towards the end but there isn’t much to say about this one. I guess it was kind of popular among the otaku since the girlfriend has gotten several statues made. Continue reading

The Cool Kyoushinsha reading continues. Rabuta is about a girl who for some reason is in love with the school’s biggest delinquent. They’re polar opposites on top of that. His nickname or what the others in class call him is “white pig” because he’s tall, bald and fat but the girl is tiny. She keeps telling him that she likes him and he keeps resisting but she slowly wears him down and it turns into a decent little story.Continue reading

Mononoke Sharing is another from the Cool Kyoushinsha. Yes I read through a lot of his stuff the past few days.

The main character Yata is very much like Kobayashi from Dragon Maid but since he made it, that kind of happens sometimes. It’s about a high school girl who has to find a place to live but she doesn’t have a lot of money. So she moves in with 5 big breasted yokai (that’s how Cool described it so I am too). Continue reading

Still running down the library of Cool. Metsuko ni Yoroshiku is one that couldn’t get into. The protagonist is a fighter with a hair trigger and those characters usually have no depth. This one isn’t too much different. She’s the neighborhood delinquent and seems to be the toughest one there. Of course she gets to have a friend so she isn’t a completely one sided character.

The character always gets weird looks, called fat and so on which she is actually but it seems to just play to the stereotype instead of just being the character. I don’t know how to word that better…it sounded better in my head. Continue reading

Guess I’m going to read more of Cool’s manga before I get back to writing my own. Who can resist a title with ‘maid dragon’ in it? In the closing of the first chapter, Cool actually tells the story of how this manga came about. I won’t spoil it for you though.

I’m sure you’ve heard the age old story of a woman getting drunk off her ass and climbing a mountain to find a dragon, right? Well that’s how Kobayashi and Tooru meet. I don’t know how many people climb mountain after getting drunk but Kobayashi did and there she meets Tooru in dragon form, I guess because she was drunk, she wasn’t scared. Not realizing what she said when she was drunk, she invited Tooru to live with her. Continue reading